"It was followed in March by two magnitude.4.6 earthquakes and lots of aftershocks, and they've continued ever since," he said.

"We had a magnitude-4.5 in July last year, there's about 400 altogether that's happened."

Seismologist David Jepsen said there were aftershocks of around magnitude 3.5 near the epicentre.

"[It was a] shallow earthquake. That's why people felt it so strongly," he said.

"You do get the rolling because you get the surface waves that get generated that people can feel quite strongly."

ABC reporter Hamish Fitzsimmons spoke with a number of residents in a pub near the epicentre, who said glasses crashed to the ground.

We have spoken to people in Moe and there are reports of things like supermarket shelves falling down and things coming off supermarket shelves.

I spoke to the people in the Moe pub and they said glasses and bottles had come down. There was a pool competition going on there, and a woman I spoke to said she thought that the pool players may have thought they had been going at it a bit long. But there have been no injuries reported so far.

There was one incident - we spoke to the ambulance service - someone was unlucky enough to be on a ladder at the time of the earthquake and they fell off.

"There were a lot of calls, and the Premier and I in fact went to the State Control Centre at about 11 o'clock last night and spent about a half an hour with them as they were liaising with the different agencies," he said.

"But everything is under control, I'm pleased to say, and the main thing is no one was injured."

Professor Mike Sandiford of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne says it is an unusual event.

"It was a significant shaking event. We don't often get earthquakes which shake much of Melbourne," he said.

"Every few years we have an earthquake which tends to be to the south-east of Melbourne in Gippsland which impacts the eastern suburbs, shaking the eastern suburbs and even more rarely gets to the city centre."

The Federal Government says most home, building and contents insurance covers earthquake damage but individuals should check their policies.

"I've been in touch with the insurance council since the earthquake occurred. The Insurance Council of Australia has advised me unambiguously that home and contents insurance policy does cover for earthquake damage," he said.

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.